Gresham College

Who we are

Gresham College is a charity which provides high-quality free education to the public across a broad range of subjects. The College aims to stimulate a love of learning and intellectual curiosity and to champion academic rigour, professional expertise and freedom of expression. 

Gresham College has been providing free lectures within the City of London since 1597. Lectures are attended by an in-person audience and live-streamed around the world. We have currently had over 60 million online views. To watch please visit our website www.gresham.ac.uk or look on YouTube. 

 The College is in the first year of an exciting five-year plan which has the primary aim of increasing and broadening the audience which the College reaches. The funding for the next five years has been agreed by the College’s historic sponsors and provides a firm base from which to deliver an ambitious and exciting programme. The future College strategy sees us continuing to evolve our work in growing audiences in both numbers and diversity, while taking advantage of opportunities to develop income streams to stretch our ambition further. 

The current academic programme consists of approximately 100 lectures for the general public as well as lectures delivered to young people in schools and a growing oracy competition for young people.   Currently sixty public lectures are given by our 10 Professors; forty are curated annually; and between ten and twenty are delivered to young people in schools